Joseph Priestley: his Life and Chemical Work. A LECTURE, delivered in the Hulme Town Hall, Manchester, on BY PROFESSOR THORPE, F.R.S.E. HOSE of you who read newspapers will, probably, not have forgotten that on the first of August of this present year a great gathering took place at Birmingham to do honour to Joseph Priestley, one of that band of scientific worthies which made the reign of George III. for ever memorable. On that day, Professor Huxley (than whom no one is better qualified to appreciate the whole outcome of Priestley's life, or better able to set forth the singular force and beauty of his character) uncovered a statue which the friends of science and of liberal thought had raised to the memory of the philosopher. Should there be one among you who, by any mischance, now hears of this event for the first time, let me recommend him to inwardly digest the address which Dr. Huxley then delivered: it is contained in the October number of Macmillan's Magazine, a periodical which, doubtless, finds a place on the tables of the library down stairs. But Birmingham was not the only town in England, nor were Englishmen the only people, that did homage to the memory of Priestley on that day. The lovers of science in Leeds, near to which place he was born, assembled in public meeting; and the chemists of America, to which country he was driven by the political and theological bigotry of his own people, met together at his grave in a quiet little town on the banks of the Susquehanna river. My object this evening, then, is to give you some account of the labours of that philosopher, whose services in the cause of truth, and whose sacrifices in the struggle for freedom of thought, were, seventy years after his death, thus gratefully recognised. But the very richness of my material is a source of embarrasment; for Priestley was a man of so many and such diverse acquirements A man so various, that he seemed to be his energy and the power of his application were so intense, the range of his work so wide, that the attempt to do justice to the many-sidedness of the man and of his labours would require me to inflict on you, not one lecture alone, but a whole series. You may form some conception of his marvellous mental activity, when I tell you that, as appears from the catalogue drawn up by his son after his death, he published no fewer than 108 works. Among them we have two volumes, "On the History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours;" next, two volumes of "Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit;" "A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism;" "A General History of the Christian Church," in six volumes; "The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established;" "A Treatise on Civil Government;" six volumes of “ Experiments on Different Kinds of Air;" "A Harmony of the Evangelists in Greek;" "A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective;" and "The Rudiments of English Grammar, Adapted to the Use of Schools." And this formidable development of the cacoëthes scribendi came, as he tells us, by a practice of abstracting sermons and writing much in verse. Some particulars of the life of this extraordinary man may be interesting to you. He was born in 1733, at Fieldhead, a hamlet of some half-dozen houses, about six miles from Leeds. The old home of the Priestleys was pulled down some years ago. It was described by one who pointed out its site to me, and who remembered it well, as a little house of three small rooms, built of stone and slated with flags. By the kindness of my friend Mr. Richard Reynolds, I have been able to obtain a photograph of the place, which I will now throw upon the screen. Jonas Priestley, the father, was a cloth-dresser by trade. Of the mother but little is known beyond that she was the daughter of a farmer living near Wakefield. She died when Priestley was only seven years old, and he was taken charge of by his aunt, a Mrs. Keighley, a pious and excellent woman, in good position, but who, as he tells us, "knew no other use of wealth, or of talents of any kind, than to do good." The boy was of a weakly consumptive habit, one consequence of which was seen in the desultory character of his early education. But his home-life with his aunt must have done much to make up for the deficiencies of his school-training. She encouraged him in his fondness for books, and as her house was the resort of all the dissenting clergymen in the district without distinction, young Priestley was constantly brought in contact with men of culture and of liberal thought, and several of them seem to have made a lasting impression on his vigorous mind. Still, the gloomy Calvinism under which he was brought up, and the frequent talk of experiences and of new births to which he listened, had its effect upon the sensitive mind in the weakly frame. Years afterwards he wrote of this period: "I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my power to describe, and which I still look back upon with horror. Notwithstanding I had nothing very material to reproach myself with, I often concluded that God had forsaken me, and that mine was like the case of Francis Spira, to whom, as he imagined, repentance and salvation were denied. In that state of mind I remember reading the account of the man in the iron cage, in 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' with the greatest perturbation." But the strengthening intellect was not slow to recover its ascendancy; and Priestley could afterwards write, in his intensely characteristic way of always looking at the sunny side of every thing and circumstance: "I even think it an advantage to me, and am truly thankful for it, that my health received the check that it did when I was young; since a muscular habit from high health, and strong spirits, are not, I think, in general accompanied with that sensibility of mind which is both favourable to piety and to speculative pursuits." Priestley was destined by his aunt for the ministry, but her views-which were his also-were for a time interfered with by his continued ill health. Eventually he was sent to the Dissenting Academy at Daventry, which the labours of the good and learned Dr. Doddridge had brought into repute. Of the three years he spent there Priestley ever spoke with peculiar satisfaction. The system of study was congenial to his independent and inquisitive mind, for the freest inquiry on every article of theological orthodoxy and heresy was warmly encouraged, and every vexed question was in turn handled by the teachers, who took opposite sides in controversy, and incited their students to discusIf training such as this laid the foundation of the successes of Priestley's after-life, it was also, and in no less degree, sion. the source of much of his misfortune. His first charge, on leaving Daventry, was at Needham Market, in Surrey; but his congregation did not like his Arianism, nor the stuttering way in which he told them of it, and they almost deserted him. Driven to extremities, he issued proposals to teach the classics and mathematics for half-a-guinea a quarter, and to board the pupils in his house for twelve guineas a year. This scheme not answering, he next turned his attention to popular science, and commenced with a course of twelve lectures on "The Use of the Globes," from which he barely got enough to pay for his globes. Although he keenly felt the effects of what he terms his "low despised situation," Priestley never lost heart or hope. He could even say of his impediment in speech, that, like St. Paul's "thorn in the flesh," it was not without its use. "Without some such check as this," he writes, "I might have been disputatious in company, or might have been seduced by the love of popular applause as a preacher; whereas my conversation and my delivery having nothing in them that was generally striking, I hope I have been more attentive to qualifications of a superior kind." Years afterwards, however, he had his revenge; for, being invited to preach in the district when he had raised himself to some degree of notice in the world, the same people crowded to hear him; and though his elocution was not much improved, they professed to admire one of the same discourses they had formerly despised. From Needham he passed on to Nantwich, in Cheshire, where he found himself in more congenial society, and in better circumstances, so that he was able to buy books and a few philosophical instruments. Not that philosophy here occupied the whole of his leisure, for he tells us that he betook himself to music, and learnt to play on the English flute, as the easiest instrument. Music he recommends to all studious persons; and it will be better for them, he says, if, like himself, they should have no very fine ear or exquisite taste, as by this means they will be more easily pleased, and be less apt to be offended when the performances they hear are but indifferent. In 1761 he was invited to Warrington, as "tutor in the languages" in the Dissenting Academy in that town. Here he taught Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian; and delivered courses of lectures on Logic, on Elocution, on the Theory of Language, on Oratory and Criticism, on History and General Policy, on Civil Law, and on Anatomy. About this time, too, he made the friendship of Benjamin Franklin—a friendship which con stitutes a turning-point in Priestley's career, for Franklin encouraged his leaning towards philosophical pursuits, warmly recommending him to undertake his proposed History of Electricity, and furnishing hin with books for the purpose. In connection with this work, he made a number of original observations in electricity, on account of which the book was favourably received; its author was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Doctor of Laws of Edinburgh University. Priestley by this time was married, but seeing no prospect of providing for his family at Warrington, he accepted an invitation to take charge of a congregation in Leeds, and thither he removed in 1767. Having leisure, he redoubled his attention to experimental philosophy, and commenced that brilliant series of discoveries by which other hands and other brains than his accomplished the destruction of one of the biggest stumbling-blocks to human knowledge of which history has any record. "But," writes Priestley, "the only person in Leeds who gave much attention to my experiments was Mr. Hey, a surgeon. When I left Leeds he begged off me the earthen trough in which I had made all my experiments on air while I was there. It was such an one as is there commonly used for washing linen." A century, however, has changed the sentiments of Yorkshire men towards science; for they now not only show a lively interest in Priestley's work, but they have recently given evidence of a laudable desire to avail themselves of the fruit of it. The publication by Priestley of a possible method of preventing scurvy at sea, was probably the reason of a proposal that he should accompany Captain Cook, as naturalist, in his second voyage to the South Seas. "But the appointment," says Professor Huxley, in mentioning this circumstance, "lay in the hands of the Board of Longitude, of which certain clergymen were members; and whether these worthy ecclesiastics feared that Priestley's presence among the ship's company might expose His Majesty's Sloop, Resolution, to the fate which aforetime befell a certain ship that went from Joppa to Tarshish; or whether they were alarmed lest a Socinian should undermine that piety which, in the days of Commodore Trunnion, so strikingly characterised sailors, does not appear; but at any rate they objected to Priestley on account of his religious principles,' and appointed the two Forsters, whose religious principles, if they had been known to these well-meaning but not far-sighted persons, would probably have surprised them." But the "worthy ecclesiastics," after all, did the right thing, even it they did it unwittingly; for science, as the sequel showed, was |